More media: Just My Type

I’m almost afraid to admit it. Several months ago, I ordered a copy of the UK first edition of Simon Garfield’s Just My Type. I read it rather quickly, and even enjoyed some of it, although the amount of factual errors and oversights in the text was completely maddening. Paul Shaw has written up a review of the book’s failings better than anyone else probably could; if there were an option print out his article to sign like a petition, I would do so.

Nevertheless, I got an e-mail last week about a podcast from the Copyright Clearance Center. Despite the odd-sounding name, the message led me to an interesting 20-minute interview with Simon Garfield. You can listen to it here – http://beyondthebookcast.com/just-my-type

Nice moments in the interview include a story about how Helvetica (the film) inspired Just My Type. It is also swell to learn about just how much Garfield likes Helvetica (the typeface). Unfortunately, the not-true story about Cyrus Highsmith’s “day without Helvetica” is repeated. The same page that I link to above has a crazy, minute-long animation advertising the US edition of the book, put together by Penguin USA; the film is worth a look. Without spoiling too much, it shows the compound word “JustMyType” in a whole lot of different typefaces.

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Dan Reynolds is a typeface designer and typographic researcher in Berlin. TypeOff.™ – this blog – launched in 2004; it was founded by a collective of typography students in Offenbach, Germany. The members of this team have each moved on to better things, but the »Offenbach Typostammtisch« inaugurated by the group still meets occasionally.

Most text here is currently set with a custom webfont forked from the font family that would eventualy become the Malabar typeface. Information about this webfont may be found here.